Does your CX stink?
Baking soda has been a key background character in most of our lives. It’s the ingredient you forget that ruins a batch of cookies, or you accidentally knock it over in your fridge, and you might even brush your teeth with it. And when it’s not being googled over whether or not it’s interchangeable with baking powder, it’s doing the work to keep our lives clean and odorless. Baking soda...kind of does it all? And the thing is, when we learn it does something new—we believe it. How on Earth did Arm & Hammer figure that out?
Well, it’s because they mastered positioning. From cooking to laundry, baking soda is infinitely useful. And once that was discovered, Arm & Hammer went into full force dominating several industries. But how can the rest of us do the same with our products? April Dunford, Founder and CEO of Ambient Strategy, knows how. And lucky for us, she’s sharing the secrets of how to become champions at positioning and getting customers to obsess over our products.
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"Customer experience is not the thing that brings you through the door. But it is absolutely the thing that keeps you there." - April Dunford
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Time Stamps
* (0:00) Wait...what even is baking soda?
* (7:11) What is positioning, and why does it matter?
* (10:05) Your customers are changing, and so should your positioning
* (15:40) The differences between strategy and positioning
* (16:51) Lawyers—they’re just like us!
* (19:39) Branding’s role in positioning
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Sponsor
This podcast is presented by Oracle CX.
Hear more executive perspectives on CX transformation at Oracle.com/cx/perspectives
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Links
Connect with April on LinkedIn
Check out April's book "Obviously Awesome"
Narrator: What do kitty litter, laundry detergent, and my grandmother’s apple pie have in common? Sounds like the beginning of a joke, right?
But for one company, there was a time when this was no laughing matter. More of an existential crisis, really.
Our story begins in 1846, when brothers-in-law Dr. Austin Church and John Dwight began distributing paper bags of sodium bicarbonate. That’s the chemical term for baking soda, which causes dough to rise when combined with an acid - like sour milk. So it would only make sense that, a year later, they adopted a cow to be their mascot. By the time 1860 rolled around, the company was distributing its “Valuable Recipes” mini-cookbooks to mailboxes across the country, further carving out a space in the American kitchen.
Which is to say that this was a cooking ingredient. Invented in a kitchen, for kitchens. Now, the company always knew it had a versatile product on its hands. In the 1920s, they created health education booklets touting the many medicinal and personal care benefits of baking soda.
//Baking soda was in just about every kitchen and business was booming.
The company was Arm & Hammer With its iconic logo of a muscular bicep and a mighty hammer, these paperboard orange boxes became a staple of every American pantry.
That new logo was launched in 1867 and it symbolized the myth of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, who would strike his mighty hammer on his anvil.
And then, something changed. It happened in the late 60s. Families were starting to cook less, packaged foods were on the rise, and baking was no longer what it once was. Blame it on the TV dinner. Or Betty Crocker cake mixes. Or the Pop-Tart. Yes, blame it on the Pop-Tart. But it was concerning news for baking soda, whose sales were on the decline.
That’s when the team at Arm & Hammer took a step back and said, “okay, what do we have that other folks don’t? What are the special features of baking soda, and what value does it provide other than as a cooking ingredient?” Their answer: the ability to repel odors.
That’s right: in 1972, the team at Arm & Hammer did a complete 180 and began to market their baking soda as a refrigerator deodorizer.
Think about that for a second. How do you tell customers that the ingredient they’ve been using to make their favorite chocolate chip cookies is now actually a deodorant? Do YOU usually put deodorant in your chocolate chip cookies? As the executives at Arm & Hammer began to market baking soda in this new way, there was concern that this could hurt existing business by confusing people about what baking soda was actually FOR.
On the one hand, positioning their product in this new way could open up a new market entirely. On the other hand, it could end up devastating the shrinking market they already had. So how would this experiment in positioning turn out?
Luckily for Arm & Hammer, this was no half-baked plan. They were a 126 year old family-run business with a storied past and a defined market. That led to 126 years of insights to draw on. They knew that many people were already using baking powder to deodorize their refrigerators. They just needed an initiative to help the practice go mainstream.
Fortunately, Arm & Hammer prevailed. Led by its young CEO, Dwight C. Minton, the refrigerator deodorizer was a resounding success. Instead of using a teaspoon of baking soda every once in a while, consumers were now using whole boxes at a time. Just listen to this 1977 commercial reminding you to change out that old baking soda box in your fridge:
[1970s commercial - 0:02-0:10 into 0:22-0:26]
Ingenious.
Arm & Hammer’s campaign was a testament to positioning. In effect, they had created a new product, and a new product category, by taking an existing item and presenting it differently.
So open your mind and forget what you thought you knew, because today we’re rewriting the playbook - er, cookbook - and talking about the power of positioning.
Intro: Welcome to Often Imitated, a podcast about remarkable experiences from the past, and how they inspire people to create great customer experiences today.
This episode is all about the power of positioning. How can leaders across an organization examine what makes them distinctive, who they’re competing against, and which customers they’re trying to reach, all while setting expectations that affect CX? We’re about to find out. In this episode we’ll hear from April Dunford, Consultant & CEO of Ambient Strategy, as well as the author of “Obviously Awesome: How to Nail Product Positioning so Customers Get It, Buy It, Love It.”
Often Imitated is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Learn more at oracle.com/cx.
Within a year of Arm & Hammer’s product repositioning, more than half of American refrigerators contained an open box of baking soda. Sales grew from $16 million in 1969 to over $318 million by 1987, aided by an expansion into new categories like toothpaste, carpet deodorizer, and kitty litter. By one estimate, Arm & Hammer’s baking, deodorizing, and cleaning products were now in 95% of American homes. It would later go on to become one of the top five most recognizable trademarks in the nation.
To help us understand the intricacies of positioning and how we can think about our products in new and imaginative ways, we spoke to positioning expert, April Dunford. To start off, she helped us define what positioning actually means.
April: [6:39] In my definition, positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering some value that a well-defined set of customers cares a lot about put another way. Positioning defines a bunch of fundamental attributes that are inputs to a bunch of things we do across the company.
So on the marketing side, if you said April, I need to run some lead generation campaigns. I'd say, fantastic. I'll go build those for you. But first I need you to answer some. Uh, who's our target market. How are we different and better than the competition? What is the value that we provide? All of these things are defined by our positioning, uh, but on the sales side, same thing, like if I'm on the sales team and you say, Hey, go out and close some deals, salespeople need to understand who the target market is.
They need to understand how we're different than competitors. They need to understand where we're really good fit and where we're not on the product side of things. Um, even when we're looking at, uh, trade-offs among features and what should our product roadmap look like, we need to kind of understand what our positioning is like, which market is it that we're intending to win?
And how do we strengthen that position in the roadmap of stuff that we've got?
April is one of the world's top experts on positioning and author of the book Obviously Awesome, how to nail product positioning so customers get it, buy it, love it.
10:32 I like to think about positioning, positioning is composed of component pieces, right? So the pieces that we're usually looking at is. Um, uh, competitive alternatives. So, you know, if we didn't exist, what would customers be doing? Um, key features or capabilities that are different than those competitors, the value we can deliver for customers.
And, oh, by the way, what customers are we talking about? So we gotta, we gotta define what customers we're targeting. Then the last bits market category, like, are we email or are we chat? What's the market we're going to win.
Positioning is a mandatory exercise for your team to do, and should include marketing, sales, CX and product at a minimum.
[13:57] I need everybody to be in alignment so that we're all rowing towards the same destination. The best way to do that is to have a cross-functional team of people involved in actually creating it so that we get buy-in by the time we're at the end of the exercise, we can say, okay, we all agree.
This is who we compete with. Here's how we're different. This is the value we can deliver that. No one else can. These are the customers we're going after. This is the market we're going to win. Now we can all go off to our respective groups and go execute on.
Narrator: As April writes in her book, Obviously Awesome, “there are lots of examples of products that have historically been sold for one purpose, but as markets shifted, they became better known in a completely different market.” This is the story of Arm & Hammer, and a reminder that things are ever evolving.
April: [9:12] Positioning isn't the kind of thing, you know, we, we don't carve it into the mountain and then that's it for the rest of our lives.
It's a living, breathing thing. Our customer landscape does not stay the same. Our competitive landscape doesn't stay the same, our product and offerings themselves evolve over time. And so we need somebody to be in charge of saying, look, we need a regular check-in on this stuff because we need to go re-examine like, have our competitors changed at our differentiators changed and do we therefore need to change our positioning in response to that? So again, typically that's marketing product marketing that would drive that. But, you know, the marketing department doesn't get to just make this stuff up.
They have to pull from all parts of the organization in order to figure out what the best positioning should be.
[17:39] So if I'm trying to figure that out, what's the first step. Well, the first step would be all right. If I look at my customer base that I have right now, and I kind of filter out, you know, the really good fit customers versus the bad fit customers, because let's face it.
We all have some bad fit customers deals. We wish we didn't do like, well, you know, we managed to transact business, but you know, the customer might've been better to go to someone else. And we, weren't an awesome fit if we throw those out, say, forget about those ones, but let's look at the one. Yeah. We delighted these people, they love us.
They had a really good time with us. They bought from us quickly. They intuitively understood our value. You know, they didn't ask for a discount because they totally get the value of what we do. If we think about those customers, let's just focus it on them. All right. Now we ask ourselves the question for them, for them, if you didn't exist, what would they do?
Narrator: April explains that it is absolutely essential to interview your best fit customers to determine your positioning. For Arm & Hammer, that meant people who had stinky fridges and would happily spend money to cut down the stench. These good fit customers intuitively understood the value of a deodorizer and didn’t care that the answer was baking soda. They just wanted the smell gone.
-[38:34] So I'll give you an example. I worked for this company and we were selling, uh, Software for business analyst, a particular role in a company.
Um, but if you looked at our companies, big companies, small companies, they can to be bigger than a certain size to have the budget, but it was like, you know, thousand person companies, 300,000 person companies like all over the place. And so, um, when I first talked to the CEO, I said, well, you know, what's your ICP?
Like, what's your target market? And he's like fortune 1000 companies. Well, we just got off a lot on this list that are fortune 1000. And I said, what if I just had a lot of analysts, but I was smaller and he's like, would you sell to me? Then he was like, yeah, of course. And I'm like, okay. So maybe it has nothing to do with the size of the company.
So we ran this, we did this little exercise. We ran a net promoter score survey to see who was really happy. And then we filtered out the really happy people. And then we did 30 interviews and every interview went the same and it was fascinating. So we, we get in the interview and we'd say, what were you using before you bought them?
Then they said, and they'd say some other project management tool, they'd say something like we use JIRA. Now JIRA is amazing product. It's a world-class project management tool. Like why would you leave JIRA for us? We're a little startup, right? We're like, wow. JIRA is a great product. Why did you switch?
And they said, well, Uh, we did an acquisition and we bought this other company and now we had the project manager three different sites. And so we really needed a way to collaborate. You know, when the team was all spread out, which we weren't before, and you guys had this feature that feature, this feature that helped us do it.
So we switched from JIRA. Oh, neat. Okay. So we take that all down. Then we do the next meeting and the person says the same thing, like, oh, we're using it last, you know, it was fantastic software, a great big company. Why would you go off that? And they said, well, um, we used to have everybody all together in one spot, but then we decided we were going out or.
To do some development to India, this company in India. And so now we have teams in different places. And so we needed to manage these teams in different places. New folks had blah, blah, blah, and the other guys didn't. So that's why we switched. So it turned out it had nothing to do with the industry, the company size.
Narrator: This is a classic example of positioning done wrong! A company defines their market based on company size, industry or geography rather than digging into the details of why their best customers bought. It would be like Arm and Hammer arbitrarily targeting houses that had 2 cars or had household income above a million.
April: [27:59] So, you know, what we have to do is kind of look at it again, like, who are you out there competing against? What have you got that they don't, what's the value of that? Why does that matter? Why does an, even if it's a small differentiator, it could actually matter quite a lot.
And then the next piece of that. Who cares about that? So it's not just that it's, it's different and there's value. Not everybody appreciates that value the same.
// So let’s say your product has the top 9 features just like a competitor, but there is one small feature that is different, one small feature that your customers tell you they love. You should absolutely position around that feature because it is what sets you apart and drives value.
April also tells us that positioning and strategy are not the same thing. There is a key distinction.
April: [16:36] So strategy kind of says, well, yeah, You, maybe you're selling to these kinds of customers today, but you've got an ambition to sell to a different kind of customers and I'm at a fork in the road.
And I can either say, well, I'm just going to sell to businesses or maybe I'll sell to individuals. And I've got to decide which one, in my opinion, that's a strategic decision and you'll need to decide, okay, I'm going to take the left or the right fork in that road. And I'll need to make sure that I have an offer.
That meets the needs of that market. So, but that's a strategy thing. Positioning is more concerned with, I got an offering today and I am winning deals today. And what I'm trying to do with my positioning is I'm trying to be absolutely clear. This is the kind of company that is a really good fit for me because they care a lot about a value that I can deliver that no one else can.
Narrator: So how does this all connect to customer experience? By being, as April puts it, “really tight and really crisp” on your story, you set customer expectations.
April: [30:11] I actually had a company come to me once and they said they were emailed for lawyers. And I was like, Ooh, you know, for lawyers who knew the lawyers got to get their own email.
Okay. Fine email for lawyers. And they start showing me a demo. And I just assumed, because it was positioned that way. I assume that, you know, they're like emails. So I said, Hey, how does the calendar work on the email for lawyers thing? And the guy says, oh, we don't have it. Like what, how can you, how do you replace Gmail and outlook?
If you don't have a calendar and then, oh, we don't compete with Gmail and outlook. I'm like, what? So you can't say your email and not have a calendar. You can't say your email and oh, no, but I don't compete with any email on the market. There's this expectation. You've set me up that way. So then I'm like, okay, so what have you got that?
You know, you have customers that love you. Why do the customers love you so much and say, oh, we've got this feature. It's amazing. What it does is, um, you got the lawyers and you got their clients and they're going to collaborate on documents. So what this feature does is it looks at the documents and it uses AI stuff to figure out who should have access to the document.
Puts them in a super secure place. And then it only gives access to the people that are supposed to have access to it. It's like a collaboration thing. I'm like, that's amazing. That sounds really good. I can see the lawyers being really excited about that. But is that email, but I buy email to solve that problem.
No. So, so, you know, these guys are contextualizing, this product is email and it's just confusing the heck out of me. Like I look at it and I'm like, you know, like what that is is crappy email. It doesn't even have a calendar for gosh sakes. Right. And so instead of. I can take that same product and I could just put it in a different context and the expectations would be different.
So if I took the same product and I say, it's not emails, not email it's team collaboration for Lloyd. Hmm, collaboration for lawyers is a totally different thing. I don't expect it to compete with Gmail anymore. I don't expect it to have a calendar anymore. I do expect it to do something neat that lawyers need to do in terms of collaboration.
Narrator: And it goes for pricing as well. As April explained, no one expects to pay for email. But when it’s positioned as a team collaboration tool, that’s a whole different ball game.
April: [32:53] So where I think positioning is really important in terms of. The experience for customers is it sets an expectation about what this thing is and how you're going to operate with the world. And if you set that expectation up and then you don't meet it, but nobody's happy they get halfway through your pipeline and then they go, oh, you're that?
I thought you were this and they drop out or worse.
Narrator: Positioning also dictates the type of customer interaction you have.
April: [46:07] in the same way we think about branding, like, you know, your company is going to stand for something. Uh, and positioning's a piece of that, right?
Figuring out what you stand for. And then it's like, like, let's say for example, I sell, uh, Security software for banks. There's an expectation around there in how you're going to interact with me. And so, you know, you're not, you're not gonna, you're not gonna send me cheesy attachments that aren't encrypted.
Um, you're not gonna use casual language with me. You're going to be all business, your branding, and the whole experience of working with you has got to inspire trust because. That's your jam, as opposed to, you know, if I sell. Yeah. I don't know toys for kids. Then, then everything can be a bit more playful, you know, and the way you interact with people, it can be more playful and all of that's got to make sense together.
Right. So you need to think about what are the expectations you're setting up in the minds of customers, about what you're all about, and then do you deliver on those expectations or not? Or are you actually delivering this experience? That's like, At odds with that and making everyone go, do I really want to trust my bank data to these people with the little, you know, that are sending me an email with a gift?
No, I don't.
[34:09] Um, so all of these things matter the way you position a product actually sets off a set of assumptions in the minds of customers about who your competitors are, what your features are, what your pricing is.
What they can expect from you in terms of support and other things. And if you do a good job of positioning it and all those assumptions are correct. Well, that's great. You know, you're doing marketing and sales a favor, but if you position it badly and it triggers a set of assumptions, Your product that aren't true.
Narrator: And you know what they say about assuming...
April: [34:41] Well, nobody's going to be happy with that. And, and everyone in marketing and sales is going to have to try and undo that damage and get customers pointed in a totally different direction. And that's awkward and about experience for everybody.
April: [50:59] the customer experience is often what we would call a retention feature rather than acquisition feature.
So it's not the thing that brought you through the door. But it is absolutely the thing that keeps you there.
Narrator: By the way: as a positioning expert, April was well-versed in the story of Arm & Hammer, and sees it as one of the great success stories of positioning.
April: [57:09] If you look at what Arm-in-Hammer is worth as a company today, um, the sales on that completely exploded and it turned into this whole other business in interesting.
Even their fear of cannibalizing, the baking business didn't actually come to pass. They're still a baking ingredient. You know, not many people baking these days, but people still buy baking soda debate with as well. So I think it's an interesting example of, you know, a company really understanding what their differentiated capabilities are and getting really creative on.
You know, maybe we could take this and reposition it in a completely different market for a completely different use case. And maybe there's a big opportunity there.
Narrator:
Positioning is an exercise that helps us identify what our customers really want and set the expectation to deliver that value. As in the example of Arm & Hammer, it can transform a company's value while leaving the product completely unchanged. As such, positioning is one of the most powerful tools in any CX leader’s toolbox.
And if you use it right then, like Arm & Hammer, you might be able to have your cake and eat it too.
This is your host, Ian Faison, CEO of Caspian Studios. Thank you for listening to another episode of Often Imitated. If you like what you’re hearing, tell a friend or leave us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. This podcast was narrated by me, Ian Faison and produced by Ben Oddo, Ezra Bakker Trupiano, Mackey Wilson and Ben Wilson. You can learn more about our team at CaspianStudios.com
This podcast is brought to you by the generous support of our friends at Oracle. Make every interaction matter with Oracle Advertising and CX. Connect all your data and empower your entire business to deliver exceptional customer experiences from acquisition…to retention…and everything in between. Learn more at oracle.com/cx.